White House amends rules after “inappropriate” NEA conference call

posted at 3:36 pm on September 22, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

When the story of the conference call conducted by the National Endowment of the Arts first broke, the White House attempted to ignore it. After Big Hollywood published the audio of White House officials presenting “specific asks” for grant recipients to plug Barack Obama’s domestic agenda, the media began pushing for more answers. Jake Tapper reports today that the story has forced the Obama administration to do the obligatory issuance of “new guidelines” to avoid a repeat:

An August 10, 2009 National Endowment for the Arts conference call in which artists were asked to help support President Obama’s agenda — a call that at least one good government group called “inappropriate” — has prompted the White House to issue new guidelines to prevent such a call from ever happening again.

“The point of the call was to encourage voluntary participation in a national service initiative by the arts community,” White House spokesman Bill Burton told ABC News. “To the extent there was any misunderstanding about what the NEA may do to support the national service initiative, we will correct it. We regret any comments on the call that may have been misunderstood or troubled other participants. We are fully committed to the NEA’s historic mission, and we will take all steps necessary to ensure that there is no further cause for questions or concerns about that commitment.” …

“Government agencies are not supposed to be engaged in political activities,” Sloan said. “Here, because they didn’t veer off into ‘This is about the election,’ where you’d get into violations of the Hatch Act, it’s not illegal. But it doesn’t look good — it looks terrible. It’s inappropriate.”

The White House continues to insist that the allegations of politicization are “false and misleading,” but the call clearly attempted to push grant recipients into hitting the favorite themes of the Obama administration’s domestic agenda. Anyone who listened to that call knew exactly what Sergant and Buffy Wicks wanted from the artist community — propaganda. The demand for “specific asks” made it sound as though grant funding would depend or at least get influenced by that participation.

Congress should investigate this, although with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in charge, they certainly won’t. It will be up to Republicans to inform voters of this “disturbing” attempt to create a Ministry of Propaganda — and to make the argument for abolishing the NEA once and for all. As long as government acts as a patron, the impulse to do what the Obama administration attempted here will be too strong for some to resist.

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and to make the argument for abolishing the NEA once and for all. As long as government acts as a patron, the impulse to do what the Obama administration attempted here will be too strong for some to resist.

“To the extent there was any misunderstanding about what the NEA may do to support the national service initiative, we will correctlie about it. We regret any comments on the call that may have been misunderstood or troubled other participants.

The NEA and the White House have also hired ad agency public relations firm Winner and Associates, the Democratic contributers and Axelrod colleagues from Chicago who produced a series of Sarah Palin smear videos for Youtube as uncovered by My Pet Jawa.

Any other president who was so blatantly self-aggrandizing as to openly politicize the NEA or any other taxpayer-funded entity this way would already have been met with impeachment inquiries or calls for his resignation.

It’s time for Osama Obama to pay the price for his blatant disregard for the law and for basic decency.

1. All meetings involving potential violation of those stupid US laws will be conducted under the “Cone of Silence” and any recordings of such discussion will be made on one of those “this tape will self-destruct in 10 seconds” …uh…things.

At the time, Axelrod said the Obama campaign had nothing to do with the ads, like that 1984 anti-Hillary ad, and they hadn’t spoken to Winner in ten years. It sure is nice to see they’ve rekindled their friendship.

When someone can say to you, “Hey, draw us a pretty picture that’ll make people like Obama’s nationalization of health care,” and you say “OK, cool,” you don’t get to call yourself an artist. You are, at that point, something else entire, and it doesn’t sound as nice as “artist.”

After listening to the transcript and the audio posted at the conservative website BigHollywood.Breitbart.com — secretly recorded by Los Angeles filmmaker Patrick Couriellech — Melanie Sloan, executive director of the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told ABC News that the call was “disturbing.”

We have enough educators with the Dept of Ed. thanks.
Rocks on September 22, 2009 at 3:44 PM

That’s what I’m sayin. If artists are meritricious, is it just because they’re artists, or does that apply to anyone receiving hisn livelihood from Uncle Sam, like the NEA members churning out little statists down at PS 29?

The Dept of Ed is concerned with education. Grants there go to educators. So the money goes to teach art, not produce it, supposedly. I get where you are going here but one Dept at a time okay? Rome was unbuilt in a day.

Constitutional issues of magnitude that separate the branches of our government from “owning” the free press aside for a moment, this is a time of overwhelming economic stress and duress. Obama campaigned to cut our taxes, AND to cut tax subsidies for nonessential government institutions. The NEA needs to exist without tax funds, or cease to exist. Let them exist on the interest earned from previous tax funds that they’d diverted from Congressional spending, and cultivate their private donors to remain an entity.

Democrats have finessed corruption into an art form anyways. So it’s no surprise that they honestly do abide by the “do as I say, not as I do” adage. They’ve dominated the political landscape for over 80 years and have manipulated and corrupted the system so badly that it’s a given where democrats are involved. They need to be defeated and voted out of power before we can make any substantial progress and eliminate a lot of the corruption and greed we now see in our government.

“amend the rules” Euphemism for “lets try to find a way circumvent any rule, code of ethics, or honor code by any means necessary.” I work in theatre. I am working at a theatre that may be getting some of Uncle Barack’s money. They most likely have received grants from the NEA for a new play they are working on. I don’t like the idea of taking money from the government and I spoke my mind months ago on Big Hollywood: you take money from the government, the government gets to tell you what to do and say with that money…Should NEA be disbanded? Probably. I hate to say that because I think arts education is important in school but then what happened to the days where the parents were actually financially responsible for their children’s education? Better yet: what happened to children actually being responsible for finding jobs to support their interests? I wanted to take riding lessons as a kid. My folks told me that if I wanted them I was going to have to find the resources. I cleaned stalls in exchange for the lessons. I still can’t ride worth beans but I can make a stall sparkle. But that may be too much to ask of a generation that has had everything handed to them and think they are helpless. The arts are RIFE with people with entitlement minds and open palms. If the funds can be directed to education and education ONLY, with new administrators, then keep it. Otherwise, it was a beautiful idea: cut it!

I am beginning to see a pattern with the Emperor Obe. When faced with a obstacle (Van Jones, ACORN) a decision is made right away as to how much political capital to expend on that asset. In the case of Van Jones, a decision was made at once to throw him overboard VERY early. The Emperor made some chilly defensive comments about Van Jones and a few days later, “accepted” his resignation.

ACORN is a totally different strategy. He is going to go to the wall for it, because it is the Dem life blood, money, recruits, votes. We are going to see the full Monty over ACORN and it will be ugly.

There it is again. We’re really sorry that some of you are too stupid to understand…

Am I becoming over-sensitized to the ongoing displays of liberals’ contempt for the intelligence of the citizenry that underlies everything they plan “for our own good,” or is it that the underlying contempt, modeled right from the top, is becoming just that much more obvious?

“To the extent there was any misunderstanding about what the NEA may do to support the national service initiative, we will correct it. We regret any comments on the call that may have been misunderstood or troubled other participants.

Being interpreted is to say: we regret being caught and that the public is now aware of it. This administration will make TeaPot Dome look like a Sunday School class.

Like delinquent teenagers running on hormones, this group in our current regime have never been told No. Not by their parents, schools, jobs, and are now running a country like it’s Friday night at the neighborhood hangout. If the cops show-up, point to someone else, if they get called out by the other gang act like someone else did it, then everyone run for cover and regroup. Our fearless leader pointing fingers and crinkling up the forhead to show his disdain for anyone else’s ideas are running a bit lame as well.

They can’t amend these rules. They are statutory, in the Anti-Lobbying Act.

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18 U.S. Code § 1913 (Lobbying with Appropriated Moneys) is a criminal statute applicable to all Federal executive branch employees. It prohibits the use of appropriated funds (including the use of official employee time and Government resources) for activities that are intended or designed (directly or indirectly) to influence in any manner a member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government (Federal, state or local) to favor or oppose any legislation, law or appropriation. Here is the full text of the statute:

18 U.S. Code § 1913 – Lobbying with Appropriated Moneys
No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall, in the absence of express authorization by Congress, be used directly or indirectly to pay for any personal service, advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose, by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation, whether before or after the introduction of any bill, measure, or resolution proposing such legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation; but this shall not prevent officers or employees of the United States or of its departments or agencies from communicating to any such Member or official, at his request, or to Congress or such official, through the proper official channels, requests for any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriations which they deem necessary for the efficient conduct of the public business, or from making any communication whose prohibition by this section might, in the opinion of the Attorney General, violate the Constitution or interfere with the conduct of foreign policy, counter-intelligence, intelligence, or national security activities.

I don’t know if anybody else has posted on this, but Beck just showed a direct link between the White House and this NEA conference call. Some woman named “Buffy” spoke on the call, who works directly for Valerie Jarret, who works for Obama.

How much longer before the MSM and “Main Street” (The person who used that phrase first should be drawn and quartered) see the pattern of criminality? Certainly the ACORN scandal must have alerted them. How about Geithner? The Weather Underground?